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The best Spotify alternatives to ease your conscience
(www.engadget.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
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I've been running Navidrome + Symfonium for over 3 years and it replaced Spotify. The only thing they have over my setup is a near infinite number of playlists. But I do everything myself now, I've reconnected with my music.
My main issue with Spotify was no lossless audio at the time, and many tracks weren't on there, if they were they had a habit of disappearing. Now I can listen to any track, remix, bootleg, and even the 1700+ tracks my friend digitised from his vinyl collection until perpetuity.
Symfonium, btw, is truly the best music streaming app, the customizability is beyond anything I've seen
Mm zymfonium is not open source I see
I've been trying to tell all my friends who are self-hosting curious when they see my setup that the feeling of reconnecting with your library is worth all the work alone. It's like having your old iPod with YOUR library. Adding more to it, reassessing what's serving you or what can be trimmed, making sick playlists that mean something to you. It's all so intentional. Algorithmic music is incredible for discovery and that's about it.
This may be true for most but was not for me. I was on streaming services for two years and discovered maybe five new bands. I went back to my old process of discovery (reading magazines, reading online reviews) and discover many more every year.
Algorithms tend to pump you full of similar sounding artists. I'd rather be challenged as a listener and grow than be stuck in a same sounding culdesac.
Couldn't agree more! Although I always wish the barrier for entry to be lower for self-hosting.
Literally the only thing about Symfonium that's lacking is having to manually scan the library when adding new music. I use Feishin on my desktops, which some manages to do it in the background.
Feishin is so epic too, I love it
Yeah that's true. But once metadata is cached, it takes like a minute to scan my entire library!
Symphonium is the goat. Using it with Jellyfin.
Altho what I miss as well is the big data driven recommendation of new, niche music. I tried new compilation albums, I tried recommendation by genre/tag but nothing quite hits it like spotify 'discover weekly".
Also my listenbrainz doesnt really scrobble while listening offline (downloaded) playlists on symphonium, so its not really an option.
Anyone with a solution to this?
I use Symfonium and sync it with Jellyfin. It really is amazing